From: Nico MYOWNA (I-AFD_2@anarch.free.de)
Date: Tue Apr 14 1998 - 11:54:00 MDT
Hi Dan,
> >I havn't told from competetion. I
> >have asked if you noticed the inner structure of industrial companies to
> >make decisions and not their relationship to buyers/customers.
>
> What? That they're hierarchical? Yes, I had noticed this. This is
> because they are in competition. However, they differ in their essense for
> the reasons I just got through telling you.
No. They are hierarchical because they have had an history of okonomy. Do
you know f. exsample the industrial history of time? Do you know f. exsam-
ple the industrial history of work-organisation and work-structures? Do
you know, that the first industries had been "working-houses" for the
poor? Do you realy knowing the diffrents between the short industrial
history of USA and the much longer industrial history of Europe since the
middle age?
Do you know that we have in Europe 25% non-hierarchical co-operations in
competition? They don't need any hierarchy to survive in competition. So
your thesis, that firms and groups in competition have hierarchical struc-
tures cannot explain the entire reality.
>
> >See above. Therefore this statement is wrong. Workers and their managment
> >inside the industrial world are forced to co-operate: the managment have
> >to co-operate with their workers because they cannot produce without wor-
> >kers and the workers have to co-operate with the managment, because they
> >need their wages to survive and therefore they have to acept that the ma-
> >nagment have command of their work.
>
> Ah, the Marxist fallacy: that the workers cannot survive without the firm's
> wages.
Ah, the Middleclass dream -- the great illusion. Workers are "free" to
live without wages. I see, that you don't want to discuss about interest
and who bear interests because you possibly lose there your positive pic-
ture of the good capitalism. But I'm not a Marxist.
>
> I know you're probably opposed to the very idea, but try reading an
> introductory neo-classical microeconomics textbook. (It's important to
> understand the language of your enemy. ;) Hell, I've read _Capital_.)
You don't know that I have had studied okonomy.
>
> Anyway, this theory of labor would be true if, and only if, the firm could
> offer any wages it wanted. This is not the case however, and would be true
> if, and only if, it were the only buyer of labor (a monopsony). You see,
> when firms are in competition, workers will tend to apply for jobs which
> offer higher wages. As a result, a firm which offers higher wages can
> afford higher quality workers, and offer a better product. In theoretical
> "perfect competition," firms cannot set wages at all, but rather must
> accept the market price: by setting wages any higher, they wouldn't make
> any money, and by setting them any lower, they wouldn't have any workers.
What a nice simple picture. Unfortunately is this only a picture. Why are
the high of wages in relation to the spending power on the same level as
1970? Where comes your higher quality workers? Out of the Sky? Or must we
spend money to give workers a better qualification?
Who produce your products? The managment? Of course, the workers. Only
work gave the managment products to sell. So the managment need workers.
And the managment need buyers to sell their products and to survive in
competition. Every product have a price -- and this price is subordinated
to all other prices for the same product of other firms who act in the
same business. The competition force the high of the price who the firms
can earn at the market. This price represent partly the costs of produc-
tion: interests, materialcosts, firmownerloans, costs of promotion, tax,
wages etc. If one buyer buy a product than he pay all this costs. And the
majority of this buyers are workers who spend their money which they earn
as wage.
Every firm hope to earn more money if they selling their products as they
have had spend to produce them. Marx call this "Mehrwert" -- value adding.
And every firm payed wages to the workers who are under that value adding,
because their workers work is just one point in the list of cost of pro-
ducing. -- This is the theory of labor which you don't reject with your
nice picture above. The workers can only earn wages who are under that va-
lue adding who pay capital gains of capital investments by as well firm
owners as outside capital owners.
>
> When there is only ONE buyer of labor, however, the firm has complete
> freedom to set the price of labor to be whatever it wants, which workers
> must accept because there is no one else to whom they can sell labor. This
> is how Marx viewed the labor market, and it is clearly wrong, which we can
> observe empirically: there are MANY different firms out there, each
> offering different wages and producing goods of different quality.
Nonsense.
>
> Even under a monopsony, however, workers can increase their wages through
> investment; in this case, strikes. In this form of wage investment,
> workers forego today's earnings in exchange for an increase in wages from a
> firm; this can even take place under a monopsony. Marx presumed that this
> would be impossible because the proletariat are property-less (or nearly
> so) and therefore too destitute to survive a strike.
You forgot here the back of this class war. If the firms space out there
workers and force them to live from there wages investments in the union
than the workers must return to work if their collectively owned money is
out. Than they have to acept every wage because they need money to survi-
ve. And every firm are able to dismiss all striking workers and to hire
other workers.
Many firms didn't acepted union members generally. In the USA are just 15%
of all workers in an union.... I think, you have to notice that we have an
diffrent capitalism after the New Deal of 1913 -- which Marx who died seve-
ral years before havn't known.
>
> But thanks to the competition which does exist, workers are NOT destitute,
> and do not depend entirely on one firm's wages to survive. Using their own
> savings, (which Marx presumed would not exist under capitalism,) workers
> can and do successfully invest in their own wages by striking. If the
> labor market looked as you suggest it does, then this would be totally
> impossible.
I don't suggest this. I havn't proposed that workers are forced to earn
wages of one firm's to survive. I have proposed that workers are forced to
sell their work and have therefore to be on the staff of one of the phara-
os. They could only change their jobs if there are other firms in their re-
gion who seek for new workers in their training-groups. If they lose there
jobs and havn't the right qualification than they are unenployed -- inde-
pended of how industrious they are.
Your mistake is, that your thinking about the labor market use a universal
worker and don't deal with workers of diffrent qualifications. A worker
with the qualification to assemble cars cannot produce tomorrow computer-
chips without a long training to get a new qualification. A doctor who ha-
ve studied physik couldn't sell his work as a doctore of medicine.
Unfortunately are 51% of all costs of labor costs of transactions; it's
cheaper for the firm's today and tomorrow to do this work with a PC. 51%
of all jobs get lost in the coming time sequence of the next 30 years. All
other jobs will in future need more and more an academic qualification.
>
> >The structure of the military is as well hirarchically as the structure of
> >the industry. Both have structures where competence and responsibility are
> >split from the top to the bottom; the people on the top make the decisions
> >and have a high responsibillity whereas the people at the bottom carry out
> >orders with a low responsibillity; only the managment -- the industrial ge-
> >neral staff -- could change the production and the structure of the firm
> >and have command of this structure of working.
>
> This is true.
Yes, and therefore the real capitalism is for myself in opposite to "spon-
taneous orders".
Sincerely,
Nico
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